Beauty Stalks on Eight Legs

I'm in one of those weird moods tonight when nothing seems to come together, so I surfed through some of my photo archives looking for inspiration. I have lots of pictures, some good, some bad, some pretty, some not pretty. But what makes pretty? Flowers are pretty.I really like spiders. I think they're lovely. I don't understand why some people are afraid of them.

When I lived in the dormitory, one of my male friends owned a red legged tarantula. When anyone knocked on his door, he would put the spider on his shirt before answering. I was one of the few people who knocked a second time, but that's because he let me hold Gracie. I loved the way she seemed to pause and think about it before she lifted a leg. But when she was hungry she could pounce on a cricket faster than I could see. To me Gracie was a thing of beauty. Not many things are handsomer than an orb weaver. They would often spin their webs around the doorway of my duplex in North Carolina. It was an easy way to wake up to a plentiful breakfast of night flying bugs drawn by the porch light. The orb weaver's long magnificently articulated legs move so precisely when swaddling prey in silk


Jumping spiders make me laugh. They're so little and they jump so big. They are the Jack Russell terriers of the arachnid world.




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Even tiny spiders are ferocious hunters, lurking to leap upon unsuspecting insects. The gardener in me loves seeing aphids get chomped.

This little guy is not as big as one of those hard silver sugar balls that my Grammy used to put on Christmas cookies. He is a wonder in miniature with his striped legs and diamond patterned abdomen.

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Long, lean Fred Astaire spider is not much larger, but looked so elegant dancing with himself on my mirror.

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How could anyone not like spiders?